Her hands were wrapped around the door, and she shook her head slowly. “You better find someone else to play with, little one.” She nodded and closed the door.

I stood in the silent stairwell and felt terror travel from my navel, tying my throat, pinching my eyes. Tears started to slide down my cheeks like melted butter. For a long time I felt nothing but their heat.

Did you ever have someone like that, someone that you loved in vain when you were younger? Did you ever feel something like my shame? I always assumed that you must have, that you can’t possibly have gone through life as carelessly as you made out. But now I begin to think that not everyone suffers in the same way; that not everyone, in fact, suffers. Not from the same things, at any rate. And in a way this is what made us possible, you and me.

Chapter 2

We were on that bus together. Warszawa, 1980. It was warm, the beginning of June, the summer after our final university exams. And although we’d been in the same year throughout our studies, we didn’t know each other. You’d never gone to lectures, never needed to. So we could have just as well never met.

The bus was waiting for more people to arrive. I sat by the window, the orange wool curtains drawn to block out the sun, rereading Quo Vadis. I cared less about the religious part than about the love story, the heroic turns, the bravery of opposition. This is how I lived back then—through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armor against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.

I drew back the curtain and looked at myself in the reflection of the window. There were days that I liked what I saw—the long, arched nose, the almond-shaped eyes. But most days not. Most days I felt a dull reproach against myself, an alienation from my twenty-two-year-old body.

The bus was filling up, the atmosphere giddy, laced with the promise of summer. The seat next to me was empty until Karolina appeared and hurled herself onto it, her big-mouthed smile tinged with her particular kind of sarcasm.

“Ready to be turned into a peasant?” she said.

I put the book on my lap. “Can’t wait,” I said, trying to look deadpan.

Karolina laughed, throwing back her head. “And I can’t wait to see you getting down and dirty in those fields.”